1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to editing documents on a computer system and more specifically relates to an apparatus and methods for copying and pasting information from one document to another.
2. Background Art
Since the dawn of the computer age, computer systems have evolved into extremely sophisticated devices, and computer systems may be found in many different settings. The widespread proliferation of computers prompted the development of computer networks that allow computers to communicate with each other. With the introduction of the IBM personal computer (PC), computing became accessible to large numbers of people. Networks for personal computers were developed that allow individual users to communicate with each other.
One significant computer network that has recently become very popular is the Internet. The Internet grew out of this proliferation of computers and networks, and has evolved into a sophisticated worldwide network of computer system resources commonly known as the “world-wide-web”, or WWW. A user at an individual PC (i.e., workstation) that wishes to access the Internet typically does so using a software application known as a web browser. A web browser makes a connection via the Internet to other computers known as web servers, and receives information from the web servers that is displayed on the user's workstation.
The Internet has made vast amounts of information easily accessible. The Internet has become a valuable research tool by allowing people at their workstations to access information clear across the country or even across the world. Now a user can surf the world-wide web, find relevant information, and do a copy and paste operation to put this information into another document, such as a word processor document. However, many technical, research, and academic papers require citing the source for all relevant information that is not original to the author. Thus, when a user incorporates information from a web site into a paper, the user must then manually note the web site uniform resource locator (URL), title of the web page, and any other pertinent information relating to the web page. Once this information is manually gathered, the user can then insert this information in the form of a citation to the source of the information in his or her document. When a person copies information from different web pages or other sources of information such as CD-ROMs, this process of manually generating the cite information becomes annoying and tedious. Without a way to automatically include information relating to the source document when cutting and pasting into another document, users will have to continue the tedious process of manually entering by hand information regarding the source document.